Explore: Drama
Accelerator Shorts 1
Bold works from emerging Australian and New Zealand filmmakers.
Alarms
Part social-realist drama, part thriller, this workplace portrait depicts the pressure-cooker stresses of an overworked construction site.
Alazar
From Cannes Critics’ Week, this austere but affecting drama portrays religious superstition colliding with the harsh realities of rural life.
Alemania
A teenager must choose between family and a life-changing adventure abroad in this tender coming-of-age story.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Like a visual poem, this ode to a Black woman’s joys and tragedies in the Deep South is rendered exquisitely tactile on the big screen.
All Shall Be Well
This Teddy Award winner is a study of family bonds fraying in the aftermath of tragedy and of the found families that put us back together again.
All We Imagine as Light
The first Indian film to screen in Cannes competition in 30 years is a sensuous tale of two nurses, their romances and a mystical trip to the coast.
Analog Medium
A musician couple retreat to a rural property to do some recording on vintage reel-to-reel tape. Is something supernatural lurking in the old house?
Animale
In this striking genre-bender from Cannes Critics’ Week, a young woman wants to rise the ranks of bull-running – but a rogue animal is on the loose.
Animation Shorts
Forms collide in this assorted collection of visual storytelling.
Armand
In this Cannes Caméra d’Or winner, a fraught parent–teacher conference at a Norwegian primary school plunges into a claustrophobic breakdown.
Behind the Mountains
A downtrodden father literally takes flight from the strictures of society in this supernaturally tinged, Tunisia-set odyssey.
Binti
A visually striking meditation on motherhood as a young woman goes to extraordinary lengths to help her pregnant mother.
Black Dog
A taciturn loner and a stray dog bond in this beautiful tale of cross-species kindred spirits set against widescreen images of the Gobi Desert.
Blood Like Water
A powerful, queer-focused story about a Palestinian family who are forced to make an impossible choice.
Blue Sun Palace
The complexities of the migrant experience are tenderly depicted in this deeply felt debut feature, which arrives fresh from Cannes Critics’ Week.
Bőr (Skin)
An isolated Hungarian mother struggles to adapt to her family’s new life in 1950s Australia.
Bob Trevino Likes It
This SXSW award-winner will have you hitting ‘like’ with its tale of a pining daughter and the man who is not her father connecting online and IRL.
Bookworm
Elijah Wood stars as a wayward but well-meaning dad in this magical father–daughter quest set in the New Zealand wilderness.
Brick and Mirror
Iranian cinema’s first true modern masterpiece, released in 1964, explores fear and responsibility in the aftermath of the 1953 coup.
Brief History of a Family
This taut, visually inventive Chinese thriller has drawn comparisons to buzzy social-class parables Saltburn and Parasite.
Calf
In this sinister short set at an Irish farm, an accident corners a teenager into making an irreversible choice.
The Carriage Driver
Nosrat Karimi’s 1971 film about ‘marriage Iranian style’ – a kind of commedia all’iraniana.
The Cars That Ate Paris
Peter Weir’s classic comedy of the macabre returns in an immaculate, all-new 4K restoration co-presented by the National Film and Sound Archive.
A Catholic Schoolgirl
A student at an all-girls boarding school is incredibly devoted to God. Or is it just to saintly Sister Agnes?
Caught by the Tides
Fresh from Cannes competition, Jia Zhang-ke’s latest portrait of Chinese society in flux is an epic drawn from over two decades of footage.
Cidade; Campo
Two stories – one involving a country-to-city move, the other in reverse – explore the place of women in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Close Your Eyes
Legendary Spanish auteur Víctor Erice’s long-awaited return to feature films is a mystery-fuelled meditation on cinema itself.
Clown
A colourful riff on sibling rivalries and societal expectations.
Cookies
Revenge is a dish best served during a coffee break for an overworked, under-slept new father.
The Cow
This 1969 film portrays the themes of solitude and obsession in the story of a poor villager whose only source of joy and livelihood is his cow.
A Crab in the Pool
On a scorching summer day, two siblings are reminded of their mother.
Crossing
And Then We Danced (MIFF 2019) director Levan Akin’s Teddy Jury Award–winning follow-up is a luminous salute to the various communities of Istanbul.
Cuckoo
Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer goes head-to-head with Downton Abbey alum Dan Stevens in this frightfully weird horror.
Dìdi
This double-Sundance-winning semi-autobiographical film surveys a coming of age marked by Myspace and Motorola flip phones during the 2000s.
The Damned
With this twist on the jingoistic, action-packed war movie, Cannes Un Certain Regard Best Director winner Roberto Minervini asks: what’s it all for?
A Daydream With Fini
On a sweltering summer’s day, two elderly friends talk about work, travel and dreams.
Dead End
A devastating 1977 portrait of love and longing in a country built on fear and surveillance, based on a story by Anton Chekhov.
The Deer
Masoud Kimiai’s 1974 film embodies all that is great about Iranian cinema of the 1970s: it is political, provocative, sincere, angry and tragic.
A Different Man
Sebastian Stan (The Winter Soldier) plays a wannabe actor who learns that confidence isn’t skin-deep in this deliciously twisted morality tale.
Dying
This epic, darkly comic portrait of Franzen-esque family dysfunction won multiple awards at both the 2024 Berlinale and the German Film Awards.
East of Noon
This dreamlike tale of youth and resistance set in a surreal modern-day Egypt is also a stirringly beautiful ode to creative expression.
Emperor
An interactive and surrealist voyage into the mind of a father experiencing aphasia.
Father's Letters
The true story of Professor Alexey Wangenheim, who writes hopeful letters home from a Gulag in Stalinist Russia.
First Horse
A haunting riff on the western framed from a Māori perspective.
Flide
Two friends hang out in inner Melbourne, where death seems to linger in the air.
Flower Show
Victorian-era high society’s stifling views of women are shown in full bloom.
Ghost Trail
This portrait of justice-seeking Syrians in European exile is a deftly calibrated spy thriller propelled by stand-out performances.
Gigi
Aquatic and amphibious imagery act as motifs for a young woman’s recollections of her life.
The Girl With the Needle
True crime as a post-WWI Scandi-noir fairytale – this Danish masterwork of tension and terror stars Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne.
Good One
A simple camping trip evolves into a life-changing experience in this sensitively told coming-of-age debut.
Grand Tour
This Cannes Best Director–winning Asian odyssey spectacularly mashes up time and place, genre and form, to transport audiences somewhere sublime.
Green Border
Agnieszka Holland returns with this devastating drama that follows Middle Eastern and North African refugees trapped as pawns in a political game.
He Ain't Heavy
Animal Kingdom star Leila George rejoins her mother Greta Scacchi in this devastating Australian drama about a family riven by drug addiction.
Head South
A charming autobiographical valentine to coming of age in New Zealand during the height of punk, which was Rotterdam’s 2024 opening-night film.
Hesitation Wound
A steely criminal lawyer juggles a murder case and tending to her dying mother in this Turkish drama that unspools over a tense 24 hours.
Hoard
The past comes knocking in this four-time Venice-winning feature debut that blends grief, grime, love and childhood trauma.
Honeymoon
A moving, beautifully shot portrait of two trans women on a road trip across Greece.
The Horn
A teenage girl’s mother begins to drift out of daily life, inexorably drawn to a mysterious sound.
House of the Seasons
This hearty, accomplished debut feature follows the highs and lows of a multi-generational family running a tofu factory in Daegu.
I Saw the TV Glow
Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith star as teen outsiders whose obsessive pop-culture fandom causes rifts in their realities.
In the Garden of Tulips
A poignant glimpse of the bond between a father and his teenage daughter at the height of the Iran–Iraq war.
In the Shadow of the Cypress
When a beached whale runs ashore, a father and daughter disagree about its fate.
In Vitro
A disturbing secret threatens a couple’s relationship in this rural-set sci-fi thriller starring Succession’s Ashley Zukerman.
Inside
Guy Pearce stars in this prison-set portrait of incarceration and salvation – the feature debut from Short Film Palme d’Or winner Charles Williams.
International Shorts 1
An awarded and acclaimed cornucopia from directors known and new.
International Shorts 2
Remarkable short-form favourites from Cannes, Berlin, Tribeca and more.
Janet Planet
Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s debut film is a sublime mother–daughter coming-of-ager that pays extraordinary attention to the ordinary.
Julie Keeps Quiet
When her coach is accused of misconduct, a tennis prodigy decides – for her own complex reasons – not to return serve.
Kar
In this self-reflexive short, an emerging filmmaker asks himself whether it’s possible to make something meaningful in 10 minutes.
Kid Snow
Centring on the titular tent boxer, this is a stunningly shot, epic drama featuring groundbreaking performances from acclaimed director Paul Goldman.
Kneecap
A Belfast hip-hop trio play themselves in this biopic that tracks their fictionalised roots and their real-life crusade to save the Gaeilge language.
La Cocina
Rooney Mara stars in this gorgeously shot, righteously angry portrait of kitchen workers stewing in the pressure-cooker conditions of an NYC bistro.
Lea Tupu'anga / Mother Tongue
A speech therapist oversells her Tongan language skills to get a job.
Lee
Kate Winslet delivers a captivating performance alongside a stellar cast in this portrait of legendary WWII war photographer Lee Miller.
Malu
A middle-aged actress begins to unravel in this dynamite debut, featuring an explosive, emotionally wrenching lead performance from Yara de Novaes.
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
Winner of the Cannes Short Film Palme d’Or, this razor-sharp, ultra-tense standoff offers a cinematic tribute to a real wartime figure.
Mars Futures
A young woman, dissatisfied with life, makes a radical choice: to move to Mars.
The Masterpiece
In this Sundance award-winner, race and class complicate the transaction between a wealthy couple and the scrap dealers they invite to their mansion.
Matt and Mara
Anne at 13,000 Feet director Kazik Radwanski re-teams with Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson in this ennui-filled character-driven charmer.
Me & Mazzy Melancholy
Loneliness and longing collide in this haunted nocturnal vision of a desolate Melbourne.
The Meaningless Daydreams of Augie & Celeste
A vision of wild, nightmarish childhood play stunningly shot on 16mm with vintage lenses.
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola’s star-studded, largely self-funded, 40-years-in-the-making passion project arrives at MIFF in all its loopy, maximalist glory.
Memoir of a Snail
Sarah Snook lends her voice alongside Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanski, Eric Bana and Jacki Weaver in the second claymation feature from Adam Elliot.
Memory
Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard are exceptional in this dark and difficult love story – director Michel Franco’s most optimistic film to date.
Misericordia
If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a darkly comedic surprise from French provocateur Alain Guiraudie.
Mongrel
An undocumented Thai caregiver grapples with exploitation in this evocative portrait that received the Caméra d’Or Special Mention at Cannes.
The Moogai
Jon Bell expands his MIFF 2020 Best Australian Short Film winner into a feature-length horror steeped in the trauma of the Stolen Generations.
Motel Destino
From Cannes competition lands a colourful, queered and beachside-set erotic thriller in which desire and destiny clash in a seedy sex hotel.
Moving
Caught between her divorcing parents, a little girl is forced to come to terms with her new reality in this touching family drama.
My Favourite Cake
Tender and funny yet politically daring, this double-Berlinale-winning late-life romance is guaranteed to steal your heart.
My First Film
Instead of writing off her abandoned first feature as a failure, filmmaker Zia Anger devised this imaginative, self-reflexive piece of autofiction.
My Sunshine
A coach trains two young figure skaters in this endearing, snow-blanketed portrait of youthful yearning and adult melancholy.
Norah
With the odds (and the law) stacked against them, a teenager and a teacher in creatively stunted Saudi Arabia find meaning and friendship through art.
Normal
A father–daughter dramedy with a distinctive flavour, this tale of dispiriting social services and living with disability is a true crowdpleaser.
Nothing but Shadows
A superstitious widow confronts her mortality after human remains are discovered at her neighbour’s house.
Oi
When a brash, boisterous queen-of-the-schoolyard undergoes a traumatic experience, she must confront her own behaviour and unexpressed desires.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
With absurdist humour and playful surrealism, this disarmingly funny Cannes award-winner rages at a middle-class Zambian family’s shameful silence.
Opening Night Gala - Memoir of a Snail
Sarah Snook lends her voice alongside Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanski, Eric Bana and Jacki Weaver in the second claymation feature from Adam Elliot.
The Organist
A man discovers he’s been feeding a cannibal in this deliciously macabre Melbourne-shot indie black comedy.
The Outrun
Saoirse Ronan produces and stars in this moving adaptation about a recovering addict who returns to her childhood home on Scotland’s Orkney Islands.
Pleasure
Following an accident, two teen miscreants are brought closer together than ever before.
Problemista
Tilda Swinton plays the boss from hell in this absurdist satire of US immigration policy and the New York art scene from multi-hyphenate Julio Torres.
Punctum
In this dark nocturnal world, small actions – and inactions – suggest heavy emotions.
Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising
Bear witness to an ageing queer man’s recollections as he reconstructs his life from memories that are slowly fading away.
Reinas
In this winner of the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus Grand Prix, a man fights his worst impulses to be a better father to his two emigrating daughters.
Remains of the Hot Day
The Berlinale’s Silver Bear Jury Prize (Short Film) winner is a shrine to fading memories from the director’s own childhood.
Romulus, My Father (Restoration)
Eric Bana and Kodi Smit-McPhee star in this emotionally textured, AFI Award–winning drama based on the acclaimed memoir – now lavishly restored.
Runt
Jai Courtney, Celeste Barber and Deborah Mailman star in the heartwarming adaptation about a girl and her dog who set out to save the family farm.
The Rye Horn
The 2024 winner of San Sebastián’s Golden Shell is an earthy tribute to motherhood and female power against overwhelming odds.
Santosh
Premiering in Cannes Un Certain Regard, this scathing, subversively feminist take on the police procedural puts modern-day India under scrutiny.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Modern and traditional values clash in acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s daring family drama, which won two prizes at Cannes.
September Says
An unsettling and oneiric tale of sisterhood is French actor Ariane Labed’s Cannes-premiering directorial debut, based on a Gothic novel.
Shé (Snake)
A violin student’s competitiveness manifests as grotesque, nightmarish creatures.
Shadowtime
Join a mysterious guide through a double world that straddles time periods, realities and scales of matter.
Shambhala
The first Nepalese film to screen in competition at Berlin follows the physical and spiritual Himalayan journey of a woman on a truth-seeking mission.
Shameless!
When a young man is caught masturbating, he descends into a downward spiral of humiliation.
She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones
Receiving the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus Special Mention, this playful coming-of-age story follows the intertwined lives of two Chinese students.
The Shrouds
Responding to his wife’s death, David Cronenberg fashions a meditation on loss, longing and grief, filtered through a necro-techno body-horror lens.
Simon of the Mountain
In this Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize winner, an enigmatic young man yearns to belong with his disabled besties – but he’s not quite like them.
A Simple Event
Made clandestinely with little money and a skeleton crew, Sohrab Shahid Saless’s 1973 debut feature is a quietly, mysteriously simmering masterpiece.
Sing Sing
In this SXSW award-winner, a theatre group finds hope and meaning through self-expression within the confines of a maximum-security prison.
The Small Back Room
Now in a stunning 4K restoration, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s WWII thriller remains a classic of aching romance and high-wire suspense.
Some Rain Must Fall
This Berlinale award-winning domestic noir is the arresting first feature from Melbourne-trained Short Film Palme d’Or winner Qiu Yang.
The Sparrow in the Chimney
Tensions explode in a family’s country home in the Zürcher brothers’ follow-up to their acclaimed The Girl and the Spider.
Stephen Cummins Retrospective
A crucial chapter in Australia’s queer history is brought to light in this National Film and Sound Archive restoration of Stephen Cummins’s films.
The Story of Souleymane
Winner of the Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, this nerve-shredding portrait follows a Guinean delivery rider zipping across Paris in hopes of attaining legal residency.
The Stranger and the Fog
In Bahram Beyzaie’s dazzling 1974 film, a mysterious stranger arrives in a coastal village on a drifting boat and falls for a local woman.
The Substance
Demi Moore satirises Hollywood ageism in this audacious and gory feminist body horror that was the talk of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Sujo
A young boy orphaned by the cartel is up against inheriting a life of crime in this coming-of-age story from an award-winning Mexican filmmaking duo.
Sunlight
Comedian Nina Conti directs this darkly funny joy ride featuring a monkey, a radio host brought back from the brink and a dead man’s watch.
Suspended Time
Personal Shopper director Olivier Assayas proves it is possible to make a beautiful lockdown-set film in this bittersweet, intimate comedy.
Sweet Dreams
The desperate absurdities of colonisation are laid bare in this satire of a Dutch family’s fallout following the death of their wealthy patriarch.
Tall Shadows of the Wind
This symbolic tale of villagers terrorised by a scarecrow they themselves have planted is based on a story by co-screenwriter Houshang Golshiri.
A Thousand Odd Days
When a son goes to the coast to visit the estranged, troubled mother he hasn’t seen in three years, he struggles to reconnect with her.
To a Land Unknown
Acclaimed documentarian Mahdi Fleifel makes his fiction debut with a Midnight Cowboy–inspired Palestinian refugee story.
Toll
To pay for the conversion therapy she believes her gay son needs, a well-intentioned tollbooth operator turns to crime in this crafty drama.
Tranquility in the Presence of Others
Nasser Taghavi’s poignant, tough-minded 1969 adaptation of a story by Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi.
A Traveler’s Needs
MIFF favourite Hong Sang-soo reunites with Isabelle Huppert in this mysteriously tricksy comedy that won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize.
The Tree's Home
A striking allegory on the maternal instinct to sacrifice reminiscent of classic fairytales.
Tuesday
Death comes as a giant macaw in this A24 fairytale about letting go, featuring a career-best turn from Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
An Unfinished Film
When an unfinished film, reborn, is stuck in stasis again, its creators meditate on how their lives have been transformed by the pandemic.
Universal Language
This zany transformation of Canada’s beigest city into the site of a classic Iranian film won Cannes Directors’ Fortnight’s first ever Audience Award.
Viet and Nam
Two coal miners in love face their country’s buried trauma and reckon with their risky futures in this hypnotic Vietnamese queer romance.
The Village Next to Paradise
Hope and familial bonds thrive in dangerous conditions in this groundbreaking feature – the first ever Somali film to screen at Cannes.
Vulcanizadora
Underground auteur Joel Potrykus returns with a mind-bending and hilariously shocking trip into the existential terror of middle age.
We Were Dangerous
Executive-produced by Taika Waititi, this fiercely feminist Māori-led debut is an emotive subversion of the ‘coming-of-age delinquent’ narrative.
Who by Fire
Egos clash in this tense coming-of-age tale set in an isolated cabin in the Canadian wilderness, which won the Berlinale Generation 14plus Grand Prix.
Who Do I Belong To
In this evocative and ethereal mystery, a soothsaying matriarch wrestles with the darkness when her jihadist son returns from Syria.
Winners
Using football as her vehicle, Soleen Yusef references her own refugee tale through the poignant journey of an 11-year-old’s new life in Germany.
Withered Blossoms
Direct from Cannes, this gentle, tender work chronicles the relationship between a twentysomething and her ageing grandmother.
Yakka
As two brothers get up to mischief in a fishing town, the cycles of toxic masculinity above the water reflect the hierarchies of predation below.
You Are My Tomorrow
The dynamics of a contentious yet co-dependent mother–daughter relationship are explored in this drama set among Melbourne’s Turkish community.
You Burn Me
This phantasmagoric experimental drama puts Ancient Greek poet Sappho in conversation with the nymph Britomartis.